Tag: Facebook

  • Brands going places

    So, almost a year after I blogged here about Cafe Coffee Day’s potential gains from Foursquare, they have become (as far as i know) the first Indian brand to get an official page on Foursquare and have special offers for 4sq users. (Bangalore outlets). I plan to drop in soon! Meanwhile, I remember the DM conversation then, with the person handling the CCD Twitter account and touching upon the problems of scale that would arrive with a platform like Foursquare. But now we have tools that address franchise needs, so I hope that can be addressed too. Anyway, good on CCD, because it’s not easy for an organisation of that size to be an early adopter marketer. Also good on the agency for (probably) getting them to do it. 🙂

    With Foursquare and Facebook Places, I think that brands whose product/service experience is intrinsically tied to retail outlets are perhaps closest to a kind of interaction utopia I have in mind. Here’s why.

    With every platform advancement, the customised interaction potential has increased – from mass media and the static web to social web, location based services, apps and technology like Augmented Reality. But even now, given the tendency to aggregate ‘Like’s and followers, I sometimes feel that ‘social’ as it relates to friends and followers’ overrules ‘social’ as a relationship between brand and consumer. That’s a dichotomy that few brands have acknowledged or addressed. Conformation!

    And that’s why I feel retail brands on 4sq, Places etc are near to that utopia – because it allows real-time interaction and context at the place of experience. Social is only a topping, and something that the user will scale by connecting his friends/followers to the experience. The brand/platform just has to play along. Technically, you could say it is possible on FB, Twitter too, but there the Like/follower currency is way too prevalent, so it is easier for brands to get sidetracked. (If we go by a recent report, brands will eventually find that it’s not really getting them anywhere)

    Meanwhile, just like FB and Twitter, platform protocols and constraints for brands also apply to apps and location based services. And that’s why, at this level of my imagination, I can only imagine utopia (for non retail brands) as brand ‘controlled’ interactive sensors attached to each product we consume. 🙂

    These shifts would hopefully drive more brands to define their own destiny.

    until next time, CCD, may the foursquare be with you 🙂

  • Weekly Top 5

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  • Weekly Top 5

    How To Get Your Ex Boyfriend Back

    More: How To Get Your Ex Boyfriend Back

  • Weekly Top 5

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  • But what do I know?

    Unlike in my other blog, Seth Godin is rarely referenced here. But when I read this post (rant, he says) from him titled “Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so“, I sensed some vague connection with something I’d written a while back.

    Unlike other posts of Godin, whose blog I religiously follow for its ‘food for thought’, I found a smugness to this post – perhaps the rant provides the liberty. But as always, he manages to make a point. However, for a second, I wondered about the irony of this post coming from someone who does not allow comments on his blog. And thus this post.

    It is to be noted that he did not switch off comments just like that, he has valid reasons. Even if one just looks at the scale (1858 people retweeted and 2373 ‘Like’s) and considers  only a certain % commenting, it would tend towards chaotic. But whatever the reasons, he has chosen not to use comments as a channel.

    Ok, lets move on to me now. 🙂 I don’t read business books, however I follow several blogs in my line of work and otherwise. I rely on my Twitter, Reader and (occasionally) Facebook connections to point me to interesting reads. I also use Wikipedia extensively, despite the accusation that crowdsourced content can only be so trustworthy. From all this consumption, I have ‘superficial’ information on a lot of subjects, which make good conversation. This is also because I have way too many interests, and I’m forever in awe of things I don’t easily understand. My interest sometimes wears off after I’m able to bring a subject to my horizons of understanding. Sometimes, a more knowledgeable person corrects me/points me to things he/she thinks might interest me further and whenever I need/want to know more about a subject, I try and use the web’s sources to the fullest.

    But here’s the thing. Once upon a time, I could remember websites in context and add to discussions (offline), but increasingly I rely on delicious, among other things. I’m forced to prioritise my memory thanks to the ton of information out there that I process daily. Ok, that, and age.  🙂 And this is not a problem that will end soon, and its something I keep bringing up here. (Read)

    Time is the new currency, and I increasingly feel that people now react mercilessly to an “I don’t know”. Is that an excuse for people to claim knowledge of things they know nothing about? Maybe not, but perhaps like many other things, it is one of the ways for them to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging. So yes, it might be easy to label it as being deliberately uninformed, but in judging people so, without context and more understanding, we might be falling into the same trap ourselves – about people this time, as opposed to subjects.

    until next time, judge mental capabilities?